On Arthur Sze’s “The Silk Dragon II”

“Whatever one may say about the People’s Republic of China today, it once offered the model of the poet-emperor, as well as poets employed in political life, wedding governance to lyric spirit.”

Imagine if our country were governed by poets. As is well known, Plato would have cast us (yes, I am one too) out of an ideal city-state as deceivers, leaving more room for the all-important philosophers. This point of view persists in the present, except that our philosophers today are lawyers practicing philosophy without a license. We are living through an epoch so virulently anti-intellectual, that even the pragmatic Plato would be shocked. Worse still, poetry is not so much despised in the United States as ignored, unless it is comfortable doggerel. Verse will only raise ire from the anti-poetry crowd if it bursts into view by blatantly sporting the wrong politics in the wrong forums.

Yet poets understand that whatever its current negligible public reception, in poetry reside virtue and truth, sometimes in their purest and most lucid forms. Poetry does not have to wax topical to strike deep into human motives with its swift, keen perception. And that in itself can change minds. It has no imperative to comment on the news because it is the news. In “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley went so far as to declare that through their grasp on reason and imagination, poets are “the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society.” Big talk, that. But hard to disavow, even though our society leaves room for only one national Poet Laureate to go around rousing the troops. The United States Poet Laureate is like Washington D.C., which sits close to the center of power but does not have congressional representation. Thus its ceremonial presence is symbolic and ultimately ironic.

Whatever one may say about the People’s Republic of China today, it once offered the model of the poet-emperor, as well as poets employed in political life, wedding governance to lyric spirit. In the Tang Dynasty, 10th century, Li Jing and his son Li Yu were both recognized as accomplished poets. Let it be said, however, that poets and poetry were not precisely of the people, by the people, and for the people. Poets tended to be highly trained scholars who had passed grueling imperial examinations, and not infrequently wannabe officials writing mediocre verse to ascend in rank. Nevertheless, poetry mattered in the public sphere. It was believed that if one were well read in poetry, he would be a better administrator—a shocking thought in these United States, where politicians are more likely to read the political biographies of other politicians for talking points than to crack a used copy of Wallace Stevens or Claude McKay. But, in Confucian China, the moral value of poetry, its central place in a subject-citizen’s enlightenment, was patent, as scholar Bo Yün-Tien tells us. It was a primary way to understand the Dao.